Hundreds of earthquakes occur across the globe every day, but most of them are too small for us to feel. Here, we will dive into earthquake data and explore some of the larger magnitude earthquakes (greater than M5.0) that have occurred over the past several years.
We start by looking at where earthquakes occur spatially. The interactive map below shows the past 5 years of earthquakes, where each circle represents a single earthquake. The size of each circle increases with increasing earthquake magnitude and the color indicates its depth. Use the toolbar to zoom in and out and pan the page. Hover over points with the cursor to see information about each earthquake.
Exploring earthquake depth and magnitude
45 Years of Seismicity
Finally, we have gathered all data for all earthquakes larger than M5.0 from the past nearly 45 years (1976–2020) contained in the USGS catalogue and the GCMT Project. This would be far too many points to interactively load into your web browser (more than 26,000 earthquakes), so here we are using a tool that bins that data into pixels and shows earthquake density by color; dark colored points have few or no earthquakes and bright colors show high earthquake density regions.
# Load the holoviews datashader tool to quickly calculate earthquake density
from holoviews.operation.datashader import rasterize
plot = rasterize(earthquakes).opts(plot=dict(fig_size=200, aspect=2)).opts(title="Earthquake Density > M5.0 (1976-2020)").opts(opts.Image(tools=['hover']))